


Amor Fati

by SirJosephBanksFRS



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 21:56:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SirJosephBanksFRS/pseuds/SirJosephBanksFRS
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten months before the Uprising, Stephen Maturin meets Mona Blake, youngest daughter of the Baronet of Menlough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amor Fati

**20 August 1797  
**

It was Pamela, Lady Edward FitzGerald who introduced Stephen Maturin to Miss Ramona Blake at a very merry soirée to fête the distinguished  Finnish Swede nobleman and friend to Irish independence, Johan Anders Jägerhorn that was held in Carton House, Kildare at the end of that glorious halcyon summer of 1797 when all things seemed possible. The drawing room was crowded with dozens of Stephen's FitzGerald cousins (including seven of Lord Edward's siblings) and a strings ensemble played Boccherini's string quintet No. 17 in A major. Pamela walked towards Stephen with a very handsome young lady beside her.

"Mona, my dear, " Pamela said, "Allow me to name one of Lord Edward's cousins, Dr Stephen Maturin. Stephen, this is Miss Ramona Blake."

Mona was tall, very slender and had long, straight dark red hair and dark green gold eyes that sparkled like Brazilian tourmalines Stephen had seen set in a chalice in Lisbon. Unlike the other female guests, all of whom were attired in the gauzy Directoire gowns that were the height of fashion, she wore a dark green heavy silk riding habit. She had a strikingly beautiful face, with strong but fine features and skin that was flawless very pale peaches with cream. She curtseyed as Stephen bowed and said, "Your servant, Madam."

She was quite young; as young as he, himself, Stephen thought, about Pamela's age, certainly no more than twenty-four at most and uncommonly poised and collected for a young gentlewoman, for most of those whom he had ever met had a tendency to simper unbecomingly upon introduction. "Miss Blake is very concerned with children's relief in Dublin," Lady Edward said, a sparkle in her eyes. "You live near each other. Mona lives on Lemon Street, very near Trinity."

"Is that so?" Stephen said.

"I have the great fortune of working with the Poor Clares in Dublin, both in the orphanage and the relief society," Mona said.

"The order is not purely contemplative then?" Stephen said, surprised.

"No. They have an active apostolate. They do not wear religious dress neither, given the persecutions," Mona said.

"And what is the focus of your work with them, Miss Blake?" Stephen said.

"Providing them with milk," Mona answered. "Attempting to get as many impoverished children in Dublin a pint of clean, healthy milk a day. It may sound a trivial undertaking, but it is far more troublesome than one would ever guess. That and to deliver it to the foundling hospital, as well." She was dressed in a riding habit, she told him, because all too soon she would be leaving to ride back to Dublin in order to meet the dairymen at five o'clock the next morning.

"Alone? Shall you make it there before dark?" Stephen said, looking out the windows.

"Certainly, I shall," she said firmly, her eyes flashing. He looked at her.

"If you please, would you wait just a moment, Miss Blake?" Stephen said and went and begged a horse from his Cousin Edward who told Pamela as they went to bed that night that he now knew that anything in the world really was possible, because his cousin, their monastically chaste fellow United Irishman, Stephen Maturin, had fallen in love that night with the youngest daughter of Sir Walter Blake, the Baronet of Menlough.

 

Mona was not like any woman Stephen had ever known. She could cogently discuss politics, religion, literature, and philosophy and had a greater sense of purpose than any lady of any age he had ever met. She was living in Dublin as a companion to her aged aunt, but her days were given to administering what Stephen realised was a mammoth project -- working with twelve different dairies to provide the poorest children in Dublin one hundred gallons of milk per day and raising the funds to pay for it from a variety of sources. It was milk for eight hundred children, half of which went to the foundling hospital. He met her the next day to go with her over to the foundling hospital and was appalled by what he found there, the many cases of children with scrofula and Pott's disease, sharing food and beds with previously uninfected children in dirty wards, packed with thirty children or more per room. Mona finished her rounds and they left and went to a nearby chop house to get some dinner.

"You said you have been engaged in this enterprise for three years," Stephen said. "How did it commence?"

"I told my father that I should wish to go to the abbey in Galway and he refused," Mona said. "I said then that I should come to Dublin and be a companion to Aunt Mary and my mother argued my case with him and he gave me his leave. At least I am not at home in Galway to receive suitors."

"Is any suitor so very anathema to you?" Stephen said.

"No," Mona said and she looked down at the table cloth. "Not any suitor, Dr Maturin. Not if he were the right one.”

 

**20 November 1797**

Stephen came home to his rooms in the inn on Mackies Place early afternoon and found an older, portly, well dressed gentleman waiting for him on the landing. He was at least seventy, red-faced and clearly of a bilious constitution, Dr Maturin concluded, regarding his belligerant expression as he stood waiting there.

"Are you Dr Maturin? Dr Stephen Maturin?" There was no cordiality in his voice.

"I am," Stephen said, unlocking the door, "and you are, sir?"

"Sir Walter Blake. I am Ramona's father," The old man said, not extending his hand to shake Stephen's nor bowing. Stephen motioned him in. He came in and Stephen closed the door behind them. Sir Walter looked around Stephen's very small, dark, dank room, for no lamp was lit and the only light was that which came from the fire, which had been lit for him by the housemaid an hour before his arrival. "What I have to say will not take long, sir. I understand that you have been keeping company with my daughter,” Sir Walter said. “I understand that Lady Edward introduced you. I know exactly what you were about that night when you met her. I know what you are about now and I promise you, sir, that if you ever marry my daughter whilst I draw breath, it will be the last thing you ever do as a free man, for you shall find yourself a prisoner in Dublin Castle being interrogated by Major Sirr on your way to the gallows. Do I make myself clear?” Stephen looked at him.

“Quite clear,” Stephen said coldly.

“I need not add any further threat, sir. She will not run off with you to England nor anywhere else and abandon her foundlings nor her cause; nor would you, I suspect. You will not make a whore of her; your intentions towards her are as honourable as those of a man of no birth and no fortune might be towards the daughter of a baronet and she is no Jezebel. Her portion will be gone if she marries without my consent and she will inherit nothing. If you love her as much as you believe you do, then leave her free to make an honourable match. She might be a baroness or even a marchioness once she has finished with all this charity and republican nonsense. Do you understand me?" Only the fact that this vile man was the elderly father of his sweetheart restrained Stephen Maturin from acting on his burning desire to challenge Sir Walter Blake and demand satisfaction for the gross insult he had just borne. He felt the blood drain from his face and his hands trembled as he ground his molars in suppressed rage.

"I do. Good day to you, sir," Stephen said, opening the door.

"Good day," Sir Walter said and he left.

Later that afternoon, Stephen met Mona at vespers at Christ Church Cathedral. They sat alone in the pew when Mass had ended and Stephen told Mona of Sir Walter's visit.

“Mona, my love, say you will marry me,” Stephen said. He withdrew a ring from his pocket, a ring with a ruby that his father had given his mother long ago. She looked at it and her eyes filled with tears and she embraced him and held out her hand for him to place the ring on her finger.

“I will marry you. I would give all I possess to do so this very instant, Stephen dear,” she said, her eyes tender and she looked into his face.”Surely you know that. But I would rather risk my very soul than to do anything that could mean that you would be taken up by them and tried. Never, never in life, my dear."

“The Dear knows I do not give a fig for your father's threats, dearest soul,” he said.

“I do give a fig,” she said, stroking his hair. “My father will not be around forever, Stephen, darling. I promise that I will marry you as soon as I might after he is gone. He is very old and very sick and spiteful as the devil himself. Will you wait for me, my love? Will you? With all my heart, I would not hold you to it; I do not blame you if the answer is no.”

“Mona, dear, I would wait until the very end of time,” Stephen said and he drew her to him and kissed her.

  
  
  
**4 June 1798**

He opened the door late that night of his shabby little room and Mona was there, a tweed cloak around her, wearing a hat with a veil, her face tear-streaked.

“What are you doing here so late, honey? Did you come all alone? You should not be out on the street, forsooth,” he said. Dublin was under a state of martial law and had been since 30 March. The rebellion was raging on the streets of Dublin, so furiously that Mona had not been able to leave her aunt's house at all to pay for the milk nor to go to the hospital since 21 May and Stephen had called on her daily at her aunt's house. She came in and pushed the door shut behind her.

“He has died, my God, Stephen, Lord Edward died today in Newgate prison,” Mona said and tears ran down her face. “They may as well have executed him. Poor Pamela could not even say good-bye to him.” A sob escaped her. Stephen was not surprised in the least. Lord Edward had been shot on 18 May. That he had managed to linger for so long when the wound had no doubt become septic was the wonder. Stephen sighed. He had been steeling himself for this news, had known since the last time he and Lord Edward spoke and he had begged him to desist, back in late February, that it would probably be the last time he would ever see his cousin alive.

Mona took off her cloak and wept in his arms. He sat there stroking her hair and she looked up at him and reached around his neck and kissed him. He was surprised by the degree of her ardour. Her eyes met his and then she seemed to melt into his arms completely. “I do not wish to wait, Stephen dear, for anything,” she murmured, sitting on his bed “for truly no one knows what the morrow brings,” and in a moment of heightened passion, inflamed virile principle and moral incontinence, he agreed and they made love and fell asleep in his bed.

“...my parents, my parents, my parents,” Stephen thought over and over in his sleep a few hours later that night, “Oh, my parents...” and then he woke up with a start, feeling Mona next to him, her bare shoulder very warm and soft as silk. He awakened later that night to her coughing, a deep, wet racking cough that shook his entire bed and it sounded as though she were gasping for breath. He touched her face and she was covered in perspiration and burning up with fever.

He woke up later that morning and she was dressed, humming and tidying his room. He rolled over and looked at the pillow where she had been sleeping and saw blood at the edge of the pillowcase and that had soaked through upon the bottom sheet. She turned and smiled, seeing that he was awake and he sat up.

"Soul, do you cough frequently whilst you sleep?”

“Oh, Stephen dear, did I wake you? I beg your pardon for it, I take medicine every day and another at night and it does not trouble me so very much,” Mona said. “Not so very much, not with two or three stout pillows at Aunt Mary's."

“What medicine is it, dear joy?” he said frowning.

“I do not know the name. I have taken it for over two years now.” His heart sank deeper than he would have thought possible. “I do not usually sleep at all without it. I must have been fair exhausted last night, sure. Tis only so very bad at night and first thing in the morning." He looked at how very pale yet flushed she was, in his experience, a bad sign.

“Come here and sit next to me, _a chuisle mo chroí,_ ” Stephen said and she sat next to him. He took her pulse and found it weak and thready and he laid his ear upon her back. “Take a deep breath.” She did and it ended in a coughing spell with a great deal of bright red blood being coughed up. He sat up and kissed her forehead. “We must get married today, my love. Let me go make a call on Father Burke and see if he will marry us today.”

“Is this because of last night?” Mona said. “Do you not know you possess my heart as sure as though we were already married? My father...”

She looked at him mystified as he began to weep and he prayed aloud in Catalan, “Dear God, do not do this, I beg, dear God -- not like my mother, not like my mother..." and he turned away from her, ashamed at his loss of control and wiped the tears from his eyes.

“For all love, say you will marry me now, Mona, my love, right now, as though my very life depended on it. I do not care what your father will do or say, please Mona, my dear, dear Mona,” Stephen said, his voice ending in a plea, taking her hands in his and kissing them.

“Marry you so I may be a widow in two weeks or less, when my father denounces you to the Castle and they hang you? Never in life, Stephen Maturin. I will be your wife, married to you in the church, my love but until then, I would be as your wife," Mona said."I will be as your wife and there is not a thing my father can do, for it is too late, you possess me entirely in my very body and soul."

  
That night, he sat with his friend and confessor, fellow United Irishman Father Brendan Burke, OP in the library at Saint Saviour’s Priory in Dublin, drinking brandy.

 "How could I not see that which was right before me?" Stephen said and Father Burke looked at him sympathetically. "How is such a thing possible?"

 "How long does she have?"

 "Six months at the very most, probably far less," Stephen said. "She has been sick for over two years now. She takes paregoric during the day to suppress the cough and laudanum at night. I thought it was her running errands all over Dublin that was causing her to lose weight and she eats so very little. I had never before been in her presence when the symptoms present floridly, in the late evening and the middle of the night. She retires early to be up by five a.m."

"Poor soul," Father Burke said. "Is there nothing you might do?"

"A warm dry climate -- I would take her to Spain, to Barcelona and marry her if she would. She will not leave those foundlings nor the Poor Clares. Her father was right about that."

"Does she have any idea how sick she is?"

"I think none at all," Stephen said. “Consumption in the phlegmatic with serous deficiency frequently proceeds extremely quickly once they are at the acute stage of the illness. She has bloody sputum now. She cannot lie down without coughing so violently that her smallest pulmonary vessels are broken from the increased pressure. With the degree of haemoptysis she exhibits, she has a high risk of pulmonary aneurysm. She burns so brightly at night, like a candle in a light breeze with the fever and her will is iron to do her work. She has been impeded by the Uprising, it may be the only reason she has not already had a collapse and died."

“What will you do? Will you tell her and take her to Barcelona? Surely that would solve all the emergent issues -- you could marry immediately, you would have no fear of arrest and she may recover.”

"I think she will refuse," Stephen said sorrowfully, "and I think it is already too late."

 

**3 July 1798**

 

Mona's condition plummeted overnight like a stone released into a well. Four weeks later, Stephen was awakened in the middle of the night and brought down to the sitting room and Father Burke was standing there, his face deeply concerned. "Mona's Aunt Mary sent a servant for me and asked me to come to get you, Stephen. She has become far worse. Are you ready to leave now?"

"Let me fetch my bag," Stephen said and they made their way to Lemon Street. Mona's Aunt Mary motioned them in and they went up to Mona's room.

She was in bed, dreadfully pale, a basin filled with blood beside her and Stephen felt the fever in her face. She opened her eyes and smiled, seeing that it was him.

"Too much trouble. I told Aunt Mary..." her breathing was laboured and she had a violent coughing fit with more bleeding. He motioned her not to talk.

"God and Mary be with you, I am here now, honey. Save your strength. I shall give you physic. Father Burke is here as well."

"The milk..."

"Pray do not vex yourself over the milk," he said, tenderly, leaning over and kissing her forehead. "Brendan is here to anoint you."

"Am I that sick?" she said, bewildered.

"Better to be safe, my love," Stephen said, stroking her feverish forehead and she fell asleep.

 

He did not leave her side for the next three days.

"Stephen, I am dying, am I not?" she said in a moment of lucidity.

"We are all dying."

"Pray tell me the truth now. I deserve to know."

"You are very sick, my love," he said, taking her hand tenderly and kissing it.

"Pray send the butcher's boy to Mother Superior and tell I cannot come, tell her I am so sorry," she said, delirious. She had lost all track of time. "Stephen, I cannot get the air in, no matter how hard I breathe. Pray open the window."

"Honey, why don't we marry now, my love? Brendan is here, he may perform the ceremony," Stephen said, tears stinging his eyes.

"Never in life," Mona said, gasping for breath. "I am so sorry, Stephen, but I won't give Dublin Castle another Irishman's life to snuff out." He looked away from her and wiped his eyes. She was gasping for breath, her heart racing and he measured her a dose of another thirty drops of laudanum and held it to her lips to suppress her air hunger, the sensation that she was being suffocated. Her lips and the beds under her fingernails were dark blue. Brendan came in with cups of coffee for them.

“Father dear, it is time for the _Viaticum,_ ” Stephen said. “Quickly, now, for all love,” he said and took her hand and lifted it to his lips. Brendan anointed her again and started to absolve her.

“I cannot... I cannot...” she gasped, her eyes pleading.

“Our Lord and Saviour knows all, child, the grace of God, of Jesus Christ be with you, my dear, dear child,” Brendan said. “You need not say a word.” He absolved her, dipped the wafer in the chalice and put it in her mouth and she sank back into the pillows. “Can you not give her more laudanum, Doctor?” Brendan said, deeply shaken by the sounds of her suffocation and drowning in her own blood.

“It is mortal to do so,” Stephen said.

“Her gasping... can she not slip into a coma?”

“Five more drops,” Stephen said and he gave her five more drops.

It was not an easy death. Stephen and Father Burke sat on each side of her for the next three hours, Stephen holding her hand and stroking her forehead, making shushing sounds to soothe her. “Let go, _a chuisle_ , let go, it is all right, you might let go now, my darling, let go. I shall meet you there in heaven, _a chuisle mo chroí_ , I promise,” he said in her ear and finally, her heart gave out and she was gone. Stephen closed her eyes and Brendan stood and took his arm.

 

“Come, my friend. Come,” Brendan said and he took him back to the Priory, gave him a glass of brandy and put him into his own bed, saying, “You shall not be alone tonight for all the world, Doctor dear.” He slipped out to get a bedroll to put on the floor of his cell. When Brendan left, Stephen sat up and pulled out the bottle of laudanum from his bag, measured out twenty drops into the glass beside the bed, drank it and lay down to sleep.


End file.
